Elizabeth Townsend Gard

I have now been a non-resident fellow at CIS since 2004. My work currently looks at copyright duration in a comparative and international context, and with the help of my brilliant students at Tulane, we are building a software tool --the Durationator -- to make usable the past once more. We hope to have it complete and available for use sometime in the Fall 2008.

I am still having technical problems... so I am currently still blogging over at academiccopyright.typepad.com. Right now, I'm just starting to concentrate on stuff on the unpublished public domain. Got a response from the Mark Twain project. (I will post the response probably tomorrow) Will start to contact others.

With Jake off and about, I'm not sure who to ask technical questions to. If anyone is willing to help -- I'm having trouble with a couple of things -- extended entries, etc., I would greatly appreciated some advice. I can't figure out why the extended entries aren't saving, and only short entry body posts go through. I also have a couple of other technical questions.

I am also really interesting in looking more into the activities of bloggers and how this could change our concept of fair use in a good way. Bloggers seem far less conservative than others on what they consider fair.

3. Area Focuses -

At the other blog site -- academiccopyright.typepad.com -- I've been tryig to post every week or two materials on specific topics connected to copyright and a scholar's work, i.e. permissions, duration, publishing contracts on articles, etc. I plan to continue this here this year.

Pages

"But lately, startups have learned to use the internet to their advantage whenever possible. “The climate for startups has improved since 2010,” Elizabeth Townsend Gard. social entrepreneurship professor at Tulane University, said last week. “With today’s Internet tools, you can start a business much more quickly and less expensively, and can often do it without a lawyer, an accountant or a web designer.” She unveiled a podcast with students early this year in far less time than it took to launch a bigger business in 2015."

"Townsend-Gard dreams of a world where librarians and researchers and students don’t have to waste time on copyright determinations. “I really believe that copyright should be more like electricity, where you don’t have to figure out how it’s made,” she says. You should just be able to hit a button and get your answer."

""We get questions all the time about, 'Can you help me with my patent?' But we couldn't until we got certification," said Elizabeth Townsend Gard, a Tulane Law School faculty member and co-director of the Tulane Center for IP, Media & Culture.

Townsend Gard said in each of the past three years, her intellectual property class has done about 100 trademark searches for people.

"“It turns out there’s a lot of weird questions that come up,” Townsend Gard says. The substitution of a comma for a colon in a book’s title can be enough to skew the results. “That the data is that picky is a problem.”"

The song “Happy Birthday” has a long, litigious history dating back to the 1930s. Every year, people spent millions in royalties to use the song, until a class action lawsuit was brought challenging whether the owner, Warner/Chappell Music, actually owned the copyright it so aggressively enforced. Elizabeth Townsend-Gard, Tulane School of Law professor specializing in copyright law, discusses the case of “Happy Birthday.”

CIS Affiliate Scholar David Levine interviews Elizabeth Townsend Gard of Tulane University Law School and Ron Gard of Limited Times LLC, on The Durationator, an online tool to determine whether any work of authorship is covered by copyright, and social entrepreneurship.